Open HEIC files on Windows

Turn iPhone HEIC photos into JPG files that open everywhere, with the date and the GPS tag kept, and the picture the right way up.

Drop your files here

.heic, .heif, .hif · up to 100 MB

Choose files

How to convert HEIC to JPG

1
Drop your HEIC photos
Up to 50 at a time, straight from an iPhone or from a folder your phone synced. Files arriving with no MIME type, which is what Safari usually sends, are accepted by extension.
2
Pick quality and what to keep
Quality 90 is the default and is visually indistinguishable from the original. Decide whether the capture date and the GPS coordinates travel with the photo.
3
Download the JPGs
One photo comes back as a single .jpg. Several come back as pulsarkit-heic-to-jpg.zip, and a file that fails does not stop the rest of the batch.

Why Windows will not open the photo

A HEIC file is a photo compressed with HEVC, the same codec many phones use for 4K video, inside a HEIF container. Windows 10 and 11 can show it only through two add-ons from the Microsoft Store, HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions, and in most installations the second one is missing: it is a paid add-on rather than part of the system. Without it, Photos cannot draw the picture and File Explorer has no thumbnail to show. Renaming the file to .jpg is no shortcut either: only the name changes, the HEVC data inside stays, and programs that go by the extension then call the file damaged or unsupported. Older editors, printer software and many upload forms refuse the format outright, and on a work computer where IT has locked the Store, the codec route is closed anyway.

The one-minute way: convert it in the browser

The fix takes about a minute and asks nothing of Windows itself: no installer, no administrator password, no trip to the Microsoft Store. That makes it the route that also works on a locked-down office machine, not only on a home laptop. Open this page in Edge, which comes with Windows, or in Chrome or Firefox, drag the photos in straight from File Explorer and download the JPGs. They open in Photos, Paint, Word, a web form or a ten-year-old viewer, and File Explorer shows their thumbnails right away, because JPG is the one format every program on Windows has always understood.

What the JPG keeps from the original

The photo arrives the right way up: rotation is read from the container and from the EXIF tag, applied once and baked into the pixels, which is why this converter does not hand you a photo lying on its side. The capture date, camera model and exposure settings travel with the file by default, and so do the GPS coordinates, with a switch of their own if you would rather drop the location before sending. A .heic that is secretly an AVIF is recognised from its bytes and converted anyway. If you need a lossless copy, HEIC to PNG uses the same decoder, and a completely clean file is one more step through Remove Image Metadata.

A whole iPhone folder, fifty photos at a time

A folder copied from an iPhone often mixes .heic photos with .mov clips, and the page takes 50 photos per run. In File Explorer, sort the folder by Type so the HEIC files sit together, click the first one and Shift-click the fiftieth (the status bar counts the selection for you), drag them onto the page and repeat with the next fifty. The batch comes back as a ZIP, which Windows opens without extra software: right-click it and choose Extract All. For copies that only need to look right on a screen, set Limit the longest side to 2048 px and the files shrink several times over. If you would rather not do this again next month, the iPhone can shoot JPG from now on: Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible. That changes only new photos, which is exactly why the ones already sitting on your Windows machine still need this page.

Your photos never leave your device

Decoding and re-encoding both run inside your browser tab through WebAssembly. The HEIC decoder is fetched once as a separate module, cached by your browser, and works on the bytes locally. No photo is uploaded, no copy is stored, and closing the tab clears everything from memory. That matters more here than almost anywhere, because these are personal photos with a date and a location attached.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my iPhone save photos as HEIC instead of JPG?

HEIC stores the same picture in roughly half the space of a JPG at similar quality, which is why Apple made it the default in iOS 11. The trade-off is compatibility: plenty of Windows apps, older photo software and web upload forms still refuse it, which is exactly when you need a JPG.

Why do other HEIC converters turn my photo sideways?

Because rotation lives in two places in a HEIC file and they do not always agree. If a converter applies the EXIF Orientation tag to a photo whose container already carried the rotation, it rotates it twice. This tool checks the container first and only falls back to EXIF when the container says nothing.

Is the capture date and GPS location preserved?

Yes, both by default, and each can be turned off separately. The date, camera and exposure settings are rewritten into the JPG's EXIF block; GPS coordinates have their own switch, so you can keep the date and drop the location before sharing a photo.

What happens to a Live Photo?

You get the still frame, which is what a Live Photo's .heic file actually contains; the video half lives in a separate .mov file next to it. The still is taken from the container's declared primary image, so you get the real photo rather than a low-resolution preview.

Why is my .heic file sometimes actually an AVIF?

Because some tools save AV1-compressed data in a HEIF container and keep the .heic extension. Since the format is read from the file's own bytes, those are detected and decoded as AVIF automatically. The conversion still works and the result tells you what was inside.

How many photos can I convert at once?

Up to 50 files, 100 MB each and 500 MB in total. They are processed one after another with the same settings, the progress bar tracks completed files, and anything that fails is skipped rather than cancelling the whole batch.

Does this work directly from my phone?

Yes. Everything runs in the browser, so opening this page on an iPhone and picking photos from the camera roll works the same as on a desktop. Because Safari often reports an empty MIME type for HEIC, the file picker also accepts files by their .heic, .heif and .hif extensions.

Do my photos get uploaded to a server?

No. The decoder and encoder are WebAssembly modules running in your tab; the photo bytes are read from your disk into memory and never sent anywhere. There is no account, no queue and nothing to delete afterwards.